Time to roll out another little dev journal. Major development: JPDS~streams, the starting level, has been completely constituted by me and now passed on to Nem to do various things including dinosaur placement, AI scripting, and additional foliage/object placement. I've already finished the gun placement and am quite happy with it - no island-extinction-causing-adventurer to play as, this time. You'll need to search hard if you want weapons, and use them well when you do. It's not the bare scarcity of TC_Isle but it's close.My work on the level is not 100% done. I want to make some signs for important locations, place bakers, script a few more things. But the areas meant for JPDS~streams are in a completed state and I cannot describe the pleasure it is to see all those assets combined once more. Some of the things which I had to bring into JPDS~streams, I had not encountered or even thought of in YEARS, hahaha. Only a few areas were included in the sublevels, which is all I've worked with for a very long time. I even found some cages buried deep underground in the old JPDS1 that must have been placed long before the terrain was finalized. I'm also very pleased to say that, at least on my computer, 99% of the level retains a steady 60 FPS when not looking around, occasioinally going down to 40 or 50. The smaller level size and rampant use of occlusions probably helps a lot. I'm pleased that the somewhat excessive use of CWaterEntity does not seem to have damaged FPS..

So, this whole endless marathon thing has been taking a tole on me health-wise. I decided to forego exercising many weeks ago in an attempt to expedite release of JPDS from my hands. It didn't work out because the required work increases in detail exponentially as you approach a finished version, and it was then met with unforeseen errors involving the recombination of the levels. So anyway here I am now and I'm frakin tired of it. I still have many other things to do before I can pass all JPDS material out of my hands, and I can't wait that long to regain my health, so for the next few days I'm going to start making exercise and health my primary goal, with JPDS work filling in the spare time, the reverse of what it's been. I won't be able to have the full physical activity I was at before so this presents the perfect opportunity for JPDS while I get back up to speed, and this is the right time to do it because now both Nem and Tatu have level files to work with (though I think Tatu needs to get a bit more focused ) on their own.

And last but not least, new screenshots. Enjoy. There will probably be a trailer coming around one of these days, I may even coax TheGuy into doing it, since I know he likes that stuff

The smaller level size and rampant use of occlusions probably helps a lot.

Something I've noticed while working on the Pens is that apparently there's a limit in the number of occlusion objects Trespasser can process in a scene, much as there is a limit in the number of physics boxes... I'm not sure of the exact number, but a few large occlusion objects will work far better than a lot of smaller ones (because several will actually be ignored)...

Ahhhh, thanks.. Well as it happens there are only 16 present in JPDS~streams, and I think similar amounts in the other sublevels, where I modeled large terrain occlusions using a heightmap mesh in Max a few years back, and have filled buildings with occulsion squares and then combined them per-building in Max. Wait... What about buildings that have occlusion textures in their meshes? And the hundreds of objects for fence around the Plains all have occlusion textures, too, I wonder if that counts... Maybe it's a matter of total faces?

Take a look at GUIapp... in Options->Occlusion->Settings there are two values: Area Threshold (set to 1.0 by default, available range 0.1-250.0) and Max in View (set to 25 by default, available range 1-100). Don't know if Trespasser uses the same default values (most likely) or if they can be changed, and if so, whether they are included somewhere inside the level files... and yes, I guess everything counts.

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